Labour in Irish History

by James Connolly

The Emmet Conspiracy -- the aftermath of
the United Irish movement of 1798, was even more distinctly
democratic, international and popular in its sympathies and
affiliations. The treacherous betrayal of the United Irish chiefs
into the hands of the Government, had removed from the scene of
action practically all the middle-class supporters of the
revolutionary movement; and left the rank and file to their own
resources and to consult their own inclinations. It was,
accordingly, with these humble workers in town and country Emmet had
to deal, when he essayed to reorganise the scattered forces of
freedom for a fresh grapple with the despotic power of the class
government then ruling Ireland and England. All students who have
investigated the matter are as one in conceding that Emmet's
conspiracy was more of a working-class character than its
predecessors. Indeed it is a remarkable fact that this conspiracy,
widespread throughout Ireland, England, and France, should have
progressed so rapidly, and with such elaborate preparations for
armed revolt, amongst the poorer section of the populace, right up
to within a short time of the date for the projected rising, without
the alert English Government or its Irish Executive being able to
inform themselves of the matter.

Probably the proletarian character of the
movement -- the fact that it was recruited principally amongst the
working class of Dublin and other large centres, as well as amongst
the labouring element of the country districts, was the real reason
why it was not so prolific of traitors as its forerunner. After the
conspiracy had fallen through, the Government, of course, pretended
that it had known of it all along -- indeed the British Government
in Ireland always pretends to be omniscient -- but nothing developed
during the trial of Emmet to justify such a claim. Nor has anything
developed since, although searchers of the Government documents of
the time, the Castlereagh papers, the records of the secret service
and other sources of information, have been able to reveal in their
true colours of infamy many who had posed in the limelight for more
than a generation as whole-souled patriots and reformers. Thus
Leonard McNally, barrister-at-law, and legal defender of the United
Irishmen, who acted for all the chiefs of that body at their trials,
was one of the Catholic Committee and elected as Catholic delegate
to England in 1811, looked up to and revered as a fearless advocate
of Catholic rights, and champion of persecuted Nationalists, was
discovered to have been all the time in the pay of the Government,
acting the loathsome part of an informer, and systematically
betraying to the Government the inmost secrets of the men whose
cause he was pretending to champion in the court-room. But this
secret was kept for half a century. Francis Magan, another worthy,
received a secret pension of £200 per year from the Government for
the betrayal of the hiding-place of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and
lived and died revered as an honest, unoffending citizen. A body of
the Royal Meath Militia stationed at Mallow, County Cork, had
conspired to seize the artillery stationed there, and with that
valuable arm, join the insurgents in a body. One of their number
mentioned the plot in his confessions to the Rev. Thomas Barry,
parish priest of Mallow, and was by him ordered to reveal it to the
military authorities. The leader of the plotters, Sergeant Beatty,
seeing by the precautions suddenly taken that the plot was
discovered, fought his way out of the barracks with nineteen men,
but was subsequently captured and hanged in Dublin. Father Barry
(how ironical the title sounds) received £100 per year pension from
the Government, and drew this blood-money in secret for a lifetime
before his crime was discovered. It is recorded that the great
Daniel O'Connell at one time turned pale when shown a receipt for
this blood-money signed by Father Barry, and yet it is known now
that O'Connell himself, as a member of the lawyers' Yeomanry Corps
of Dublin, was turned out on duty to serve against the rebels on the
night of Emmet's insurrection, and in Daunt's Recollections
he relates that O'Connell pointed out to him a house in James's
Street which he (O'Connell) had searched for `Croppies' (patriots).

The present writer has seen in Derrynane,
O'Connell's ancestral home in County Kerry, a brass-mounted
blunderbuss, which we were assured by a member of the family was
procured at a house in James's Street, Dublin, by O'Connell from the
owner, a follower of Emmet, a remark that recalled to our mind that
`search for Croppies' of which Daunt speaks, and gave rise to a
conjecture that possibly the blunderbuss in question owed its
presence in Derrynane to that memorable raid.

But although latter-day investigators have
brought to light many such treasons against liberty as those
recorded, and have revealed depths of corruption in quarters long
unsuspected, nothing has yet been demonstrated to dim the glory or
sully the name of the men and women of the working class, who
carried the dangerous secret of Emmet's conspiracy and guarded it so
well and faithfully to the end. It must be remembered in this
connection, that at that period the open organisation of labourers
for any purpose was against the law, that consequently the trade
unions which then flourished amongst the working class were all
illegal organisations, whose members were in constant danger of
arrest and transportation for the crime of organising, and that,
therefore, a proposal to subvert the oppressive governing class and
establish a republic founded upon the votes of all citizens, as
Emmet planned, was one likely to appeal alike to the material
requirements and imagination of the Irish toilers. And, as they were
already trained to secrecy in organisation, they naturally made
splendid material for the revolutionary movement. It is significant
that the only serious fight on the night of the ill-fated
insurrection took place in the Coombe district of the Liberties of
Dublin, a quarter inhabited exclusively by weavers, tanners, and
shoemakers, the best organised trades in the city, and that a force
of Wicklow men brought into Dublin by Michael Dwyer, the insurgent
chieftain, were sheltered on the quays amongst the dock-labourers;
and eventually managed to return home without any traitor betraying
their whereabouts to the numerous Government spies over-running the
city.

The ripeness of the labouring element in
the country at large for any movement that held out hopes of social
emancipation may be gauged by the fact that a partial rebellion had
already taken place in 1802 in Limerick, Waterford, and Tipperary,
where, according to Haverty's History of Ireland, `the
alleged grounds for rebellion were the dearness of the potatoes',
and `the right of the old tenants to retain possession of their
farms'.

Such were the domestic materials upon which
the conspiracy of Emmet rested -- working-class elements fired with
the hope of political and social emancipation. Abroad he sought
alliance with the French Republic -- the incarnation of the
political, social, and religious unrest and revolution of the age,
and in Great Britain he formed alliance with the `Sassenach'
reformers who were conspiring to overthrow the English monarchy. On
November 13, 1802, one Colonel Despard, with nineteen others, was
arrested in London charged with the crime of high treason; they were
tried on the charge of conspiracy to murder the King; although no
evidence in support of such a charge was forthcoming, Despard and
seven others were hanged. According to the Castlereagh papers Emmet
and Despard were preparing for a simultaneous uprising, a certain
William Dowdall, of Dublin, described as one of the most determined
of the society of United Irishmen, being the confidential agent who
acted for both. Mr. W. J. Fitzpatrick in his books Secret
Service Under Pitt, and The Sham Squire, brings
out many of these facts, as a result of an extensive and scholarly
investigation of Government records and the papers of private
families, yet, although these books were published half a century
ago, every recurring Emmet anniversary continues to bring us its
crop of orators who know all about Emmet's martyrdom, and nothing
about his principles. Even some of the more sympathetic of his
panegyrists do not seem to realise that they dim his glory when they
represent him as the victim of a protest against an injustice local
to Ireland, instead of as an Irish apostle of a world-wide movement
for liberty, equality and fraternity. Yet this latter was indeed the
character and position of Emmet, and as such the democracy of the
future will revere him. He fully shared in the international
sympathies of that Dublin Society of United Irishmen who had elected
a Scottish reformer to be a United Irishman upon hearing that the
Government had sentenced him to transportation for attending a
reform convention in Edinburgh. He believed in the brotherhood of
the oppressed, and in the community of free nations, and died for
his ideal.

Emmet is the most idolised, the most
universally praised of all Irish martyrs; it is, therefore, worthy
of note that in the proclamation he drew up to be issued in the name
of the `Provisional Government of Ireland' the first article decrees
the wholesale confiscation of church property and the nationalising
of the same, and the second and third decrees forbid and declare
void the transfer of all landed property, bonds, debentures, and
public securities, until the national government is established and
the national will upon them is declared.

Two things are thus established -- viz.,
that Emmet believed the `national will' was superior to property
rights, and could abolish them at will; and also that he realised
that the producing classes could not be expected to rally to the
revolution unless given to understand that it meant their freedom
from social as well as from political bondage.